


In Another Time Remember Us

by whiskey_johnny



Category: Maurice - E. M. Forster
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-05
Updated: 2015-01-05
Packaged: 2018-03-05 13:54:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3122654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whiskey_johnny/pseuds/whiskey_johnny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"A slight AU where Clive and Maurice are at school together. Clive understands his own desires better than Maurice does, but the younger, more physically vigorous boy makes it hard for Clive to keep his feelings within the safe confines of Greek poetry."</p><p>Title from Sappho.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Another Time Remember Us

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rachel2205](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rachel2205/gifts).



The boy Hall, his schoolmasters agreed on those rare occasions that they troubled to discuss him, was sound enough but unlikely to amount to much of note.  He was not a stupid child, or no more than any boy under their care and less than many, but there was in him no originality of thought or spirit.  This, together with a general laziness and lack of especial curiousity, made him easy enough to govern, and for the most part he escaped the notice of his masters, becoming part of the undifferentiated mass of boys.  So he continued until his sixteenth year, and so he might have continued indefinitely, and on through university and into adult life, had it not been for the entry into his life of a strange and troubling influence.  
  
Clive Durham arrived into Hall’s life like a stone thrown neatly into a tranquil pond; he interposed himself therein without much noise or splash, but put out ripples that travelled to the very edges of Hall’s mind and trembled all the calm reflections of his world.  Though he did not know it at the time, Hall - as he still thought of himself then - was deeply affected by his first sight of the other boy.  
  
It was an exeat weekend in the Summer Half, and many of the boys had left yesterday for the train, whooping and laughing as young creatures suddenly at liberty will do.  Hall, however, had the day before managed to injure himself roughhousing with Tate at Games - “a knock to a head as dense as yours, Hall, will doubtless do little harm, but none the less,” - and had been confined sullenly to the sanitorium.  “Hard luck, old man!” from Tate, having the grace to look slightly ashamed of himself, as he left his wounded comrade in the unsympathetic hands of Matron.  
  
Though not the only boy remaining in school that weekend, Hall was the only boy in the sanitorium - much to the dismay of Matron, who would have liked to have been granted exeat herself, as a gentleman in town had been secretly making love to her for some time.  It made her both sharp with and neglectful of Hall, and having scolded him twice that Saturday afternoon for getting out of bed, she went down to the kitchens to play spoil-five with the cook; a woman she found by far her social inferior, but who could be tempted into sharing a glass or more of cheap sherry on the sly.  If the boys had known, how their image of Matron as both stern and unassailably pure would have shattered, but it did not occur to them that she, or any woman, might lead an existence beyond the hours that they vexed her.  
  
Certainly it never did to Hall; and now that she was gone from sight he slipped from bed once more and ran in his pyjamas to the window, to throw up the sash and breathe the warm summer air.  
  
Across the lawn below a curious conveyance made its way, and Hall stared at it unseen, intrigued.  A creaking rattan chair with wheels, two large behind and one small in front, and in it a slight, foreshortened figure.  That was his first sight of Clive Durham: a pale head seen from above, flanked by solicitous adults in afternoon dress.  He thought at first it must be a little old man, perhaps some decrepit Old Boy come back to visit his childhood scenes, but as the vehicle moved on from beneath his window Hall saw that it was a boy, of his own age or a little more, though very wan and thin.  
  
It was the first time that Hall had seen a boy who was neither healthy nor ill in a temporary sort of way.  Certainly he had seen his fellows go through all manner of regular childhood ailments, and had suffered some himself; a fellow or two in his house was considered ‘delicate’ and barred from Games, to the scorn of his fellows; at his sisters’ school there had been a brief outbreak of diptheria, but he had been away at prep school and only heard their stories of stricken school-mates second-hand.  Beyond that, he had continued in the unthinking blithe belief that youth was a time of natural vigour, and the sight below shook him queerly.  He wondered what was wrong with the other boy: whether he was a congenital cripple or only an invalid, and what he was doing here.  
  
By the time his fellows returned from their liberty he had quite forgotten the sight, for the Headmaster’s pretty wife had come and sat briefly by his bedside - an occasion of powerful excitement to the fifteen-year-old Hall, whose soul was at that time in a kind of constant ferment of formless desire.  He did not find the fact of her stirring, but the idea of her - and, more, of the envy of his peers - roused in him a sort of fierce satisfaction.  Her brief presence was a mark of status, and he bragged about it ceaselessly for a day or two until his dorm-mates grew tired of him and ganged together to drop him in the pond, though in an amicable enough fashion.  He did not think of the boy in the bath chair again all that Summer Half, or through the long lazy, hazy vac beyond, and returned to Howesdene that autumn without a thought in his head beyond the newfound glories of the LVI.

 

  
  
That Hall had come to Howesdene at all had been something of a matter of chance.  He had been destined for Sunnington - had never questioned the thought - his father and his grandfather, &c - and would doubtless have done perfectly well there, enjoying the same kind of amiable obscurity that he did at Howesdene.  Yet shortly before the matter was to be settled for good, his maternal grandfather Mr Grace passed over from this life, leaving in trust a considerable amount of money to be dedicated to the boy Maurice’s education at as good a school as could be afforded.  The late Mr Hall might perhaps have seen it as a snub, but his wife, overwhelmed by the sudden responsibility and not by nature inclined to deal well with change, enquired anxiously of her neighbour Dr Barry.  The doctor considered the matter, and advised that perhaps the boy might be sent to his own old school, one somewhat older and grander than Sunnington and yet not aspiring to the rarer air of Hill and Plain.  
  
Consultations were made; accounts examined; letters sent.  A decision was reached, and so Maurice was dispatched to Howesdene and entered into Crockham boarding-house, whose inhabitants would become the compass-points of his adolescent soul.  
  
As has been remarked, he excelled at little; was tolerable at much; was for the most part harmless in his intentions.  Neither a great scholar nor a surpassing sportsman, he made himself well-liked enough as much by unconscious strategy as by nature, being a boy very much given to conformity.  It was as if some part of him was secretly aware it has reason to pass unnoticed in the world, and even more than most of his peers he fitted himself with great care into the narrow delineaments, policed with such strange rigidity, of the boyhood they allowed to one another.  
  
As soon as his body developed Hall became obscene. He supposed some special curse had descended on him, but he could not help it, for even when receiving the Holy Communion filthy thoughts would arise in his mind. Having been saved from the enforced purity of Sunnington, still he was removed from such worlds of sensuality as might have been otherwise provided; he heard with a sort of guilty fascination the oft-repeated and likely apocryphal story of the Eton school tart who locked himself in the lavatory as the school tart left the station so as to receive visits from every boy in the carriage before they all got out at Eton.    
  
At Howesdene such things did not happen, yet they were not unspeakable.  When Maurice was a junior boy, his fag-master asked him lazily one night to _relieve him with his hand_.  Being more of an innocent than he knew, Maurice needed the matter explained to him, and performed so clumsily that he was not asked again; yet the incident stayed with him, and in later school years he recalled it with perfect clarity and a sort of distant wondering, of what might have happened if - and there the wondering stopped.  
  
As he rose in the school he began to make a religion of some other boy. When this boy, whether older or younger than himself, was present, he would laugh loudly, talk absurdly, and be unable to work. He dared not be kind - it was not the thing - still less to express his admiration in words. And the adored one would shake him off before long, and reduce him to sulks. However, he had his revenges. Other boys sometimes worshipped him, and when he realized this he would shake off them. The adoration was mutual on one occasion, both yearning for they knew not what, but the result was the same. They quarrelled in a few days.  The two things - sensuality and emotion - he did not connect, though he suffered through dreams both brutal and ideal.  
  
Now that he had left the mass of non-specialists behind him and entered into the rarified air of the Lower Sixth, Maurice surveyed the Michaelmas Half with a complete absence of trepidation that owed more to lack of imagination than any true grounds for confidence.  Perhaps some was due to the seas of privilege in which he, oblivious as any fish to water, swam: his entry to Cambridge, his success in later life, would owe nothing to academic success.  Being respectable and his family ‘sound’, he might have gone up if he were a blockhead.  He was aware, in a vague distant sort of way, that some few of the boys had come to Howesdene through merit, there being always a handful of positions in each year reserved for Scholars, and had once overheard a pair of these boys discussing the fearful entrance examination they had sat.  To Maurice, whose own entry to Howesdene owed nothing to Latin Elegaics or the G.C.M. of 5325, it was a matter of interest only in so far as it told him who might appropriately be abused according to the formulae of the school.  
  
So it was with considerable surprise that he found himself taken aside by his house master on the day of his return.  “Look here, Hall,” the man said, “I need a boy to show a new boy around.”  Maurice at once thought of third formers and was offended, but the master continued: “His parents are keen he doesn’t stand out. Had a bad turn with his health, left his old place.  Keep an eye on him, there’s a good chap.”  Privately thinking: “Hall’s an indifferent sort of fellow - pleasant enough - not a dunce or a brute - should keep the Durham boy in enough obscurity.”  He had been told the new boy was an intellectual neurotic and, not being wholly without a heart, though what he had had become rather leathered by generations of boys, thought it best to guide him in an entirely different channel for his own protection.  Never having himself been inclined to particular contemplation, it was his belief that thinking too much and too independently did boys no good in their development, and did what he could to discourage it in his charges.  
  
Maurice said, “Yes, sir,” dutifully, being secretly dismayed: how tiresome, to have to drag some new fellow around the place!  And even more so when he was told in an offhand fashion that they would be rooming together - it was not assured that every member of the LVI would have his own room, but it was a commonplace, and to have to share was considered a cruel blow.  And a stranger besides! - it was quite unconscionable.  
  
So he was quite prepared to hate this Durham, especially after going to his new room and finding the shelves quite full of books.  “I bet he’s a horrible little swot,” he grumbled to Tate, who said, “Jolly hard luck,” in the sympathetic way of one who is very glad he has escaped the same fate.  
  
“Ah, Hall, there you are.  This is Durham.  Try not to lose him,” - and so into Maurice’s life was casually thrust the influence that would overturn it forever.  
  
Looking up Maurice felt a queer shock of recognition, though it would be a little while before he connected his new companion to the figure in the bath chair.  “Hullo,” said Durham, and stuck out his hand.  He was a small boy - very small - with simple manners and a fair face, which blushed now.   The master had said he was a year older than Maurice, having been held back for reasons unexplained, but:  
  
“Hullo,” Maurice said, and shook his hand.  “You look more like a Reserve boy than a sixth former, I must say!”  
  
“I may do, but I feel like an undergraduate.”  Maurice regarded him attentively.  “Will you show me around, then?”  
  
Maurice felt that this was coming it rather high, from a new boy, but only shrugged and said, “I suppose so. I saw all your books,” he added as they walked.  “I don’t much care to read, myself, beyond schoolwork.”  He said it carelessly, affecting the indifference to academics that the more popular boys professed, and was surprised when Durham was critical, though politely so.    
  
They were off into an argument, though not a quarrel, and Maurice was surprised to find himself so rapidly engaged.  Try as he might, he could not unbalance his companion.  It frustrated him, heated his blood.  And he would have to share a room with the upstart! - and yet he could not hate him.  He spoke with bombast, unconsciously striving to impress; Durham listened unmoved, shook out the falsities and approved the rest.  What hope for Maurice who was nothing but falsities?  A stab of anger went through him.  
  
“I say, Durham, I do think it a bit much, coming it so high on your first day.”  He thought of saying it, but his courage failed.  Or no, it was not cowardice, but a different kind of caution: something in him already strove to reach Durham, to impress him.  
  
For a few days he hated Durham, intensely.  The sound of his breathing at night, low, rhythmic and quiet - the way he held his head - his Greek texts - everything was fuel to his obsession.  His friends viewed it with amusement and pity: poor Hall!  They recognised passion when they saw it, though they could not have named it such.  Still, he did his duty, knowing that the master’s eye was upon them, and after the first days the spasm passed.  They became friendly, though not yet close.  Maurice inducted Durham into the conventions of the school, and Durham advised him on his studies, so that he found himself less frequently torn over by his tutors.  
  
That Durham was fragile was plain - bodily, at least.  He confided to Maurice, though to no one else, that his mother had sent him with a note excusing him from Games, which he had deliberately lost.  Maurice scoffed at the notion, and at the foolishness of mothers, and told him he had done the right thing.  Durham suffered visibly through Games, though he affected no martyrdom, and the uncomplainingness of his misery earned him a certain degree of respect that physically weak boys were rarely afforded.  He and Maurice made a strange pair, Durham so slight and neat, Maurice a thick squarish youth who, knowing his own clumsiness, held himself rather in the self-conscious manner of those large rugger players whose shoulders brushed door-frames and their heads, low ceilings.  
  
Durham suffered in other ways, too.  Increasingly in the mornings he grew quiet and almost surly, as the hour of Early School passed before chapel.  More than once he was scolded by masters for “daydreaming” during chapel; he bore the ticking off manfully, but one day afterwards burst out to Maurice, “I hate it - I hate them - I wish I did not have to go!”  
  
Maurice was shocked.  It had never occurred to him to question even the structure of the school day, as natural to him as dawn and dusk, much less the overall necessity of chapel-going.  “Whatever do you mean, old chap?”  
  
“I mean - Hall, I don’t want to worry you with my beliefs, or rather with their absence, but to explain the situation I must just tell you that I’m unorthodox. I’m not a Christian.”  His face was more than usually pale, save for two bright spots on his cheeks.  “No, be quiet a minute.  I used to believe - it’s not a matter of fashion,” (the idea of unorthodoxy as fashionable had never entered Maurice’s small world) “you mustn’t think that.”  Maurice assured him that he would not.  “But I have thought on it a great deal, over the years.  I had a lot of time last summer, when I was sick - “  
  
It was then that Maurice recognised him, with a silent shock like an artillery shell exploding under water.  The boy in the bath chair - the summer afternoon - the slight dizziness of his concussion - all were suddenly intensely present to him.  He looked at Durham in a sort of silent wonder, and Durham flushed beneath his regard.  
  
“I did not wish to throw over Christianity, but I cannot be dishonest in my mind.  I am not a believer, nor shall I ever be again.  Yet every day I am obliged to go, and to mouth the words, and to three times a year take Communion - it is unconscionable, unbearable!  I am forced into hypocrisy, Hall, and I cannot bear it.”  
  
Maurice, who had never been bothered by any hypocrisy in himself, remained in uneasy silence.  “There, I have shocked you - I knew that I would.  But don’t you see? it is a terrible thing to be forced to such dishonesty.  It wears upon me so.”  
  
He did look exhausted - more, defeated - and Maurice put a hand upon his shoulder.  “Buck up, Durham,” he said, not unkindly.  “You mustn’t take things so much to heart, you know.  Just go along and sing the hymns and say the prayers - no one’s going to quiz you on your theology.”  
  
The look Durham gave him was full of agony and contempt admixed, and Maurice felt himself shrivel inside.  Perhaps he did deserve the other boy’s scorn; he dwelled on it at night, suffered for it.  It was an intensely painful experience for him, who had never been forced to examine any of his own beliefs, and now that he came to it he shied away from it, while telling himself he did not.  
  
The school had long affected a robust, muscular type of Christianity, and now Maurice - whose own Christianity could be have been at best described as sinewy - decided that it was right.  It was no wonder that Durham’s faith had wavered when he had been so long unwell and when he by temperament shied away so much from the vigorous.  Physical health, that was the thing; he would bring Durham back into the healthy masculine world and piety would naturally follow.  He recalled a passage from a childhood book, and taking it down now found the place:  
  
“A man's body is given him to be trained and brought into subjection, and then used for the protection of the weak, the advancement of all righteous causes, and the subduing of the earth which God has given to the children of men."  
  
Durham’s apostasy was therefore not conviction but ill-health, and Maurice set about evanglising him through the outdoors.  He encouraged Durham to go on long walks with him, to bring colour into his cheeks and strength into his limbs, he enthused along with Kingsley that "games conduce, not merely to physical, but to moral health,” and encouraged his friend into football and even rugger, at which he took innumerable drubbings.  
  
Clive suffered through it all for the sake of love.  It was plain to him now, in his clear and honest mind, that he loved his friend; and not only in that manner of fellowship which was both encouraged and inevitable among boys living so close together, but in the fashion which he had known from his earliest days was a rot within him.  There was no way that he could tell Hall - manly innocent Hall - and his enforced silence was a torment.  Yet now, after the past year, in his embracing of hellenism he had a model for his love, directing his passion firmly and bloodlessly into companionship alone.  He would have suffered far greater agonies for his beloved than a freezing game of rugger, and indeed did, in the thick silence of their winter nights, hearing Hall sigh and shift within his bed.  
  
That his desire was ignoble he did not question; likewise that his love would be all nobility.  So long as it was of the heart and mind alone it could be justified, and so he channelled all his fierce adolescent passion into chaste adoration.  
  
Yet even as he adored he did not indulge.  He challenged Hall’s lazy thinking at each turn, encouraged him to question, stung him into argument.  He was making the boy into a better man, and each piece of evidence of that delighted him, refined the fire in his breast: here, here was the justification of how he was made!  A year older than Hall, it allowed Clive to imagine himself his Socrates.  
  
And, at the same time, Maurice’s constitutional campaign bore fruit.  Clive became stronger, his limbs cleaner; he bore himself with more confidence, and though he did not know it, the exercise and fresh air blew away some of the last cobwebs of his neurasthenia.  The masters remarked with approval that they had been the making of one another, and - Clive would have been relieved - saw nothing untoward in the deepening friendship between the two.  
  
Having spent so much time together in physical pursuits, Maurice was happier to play with Clive now.  Yesterday they had tussled before the common room fire, culminating in Maurice and Tate rolling Clive up in the hearth rug and fitting his head in the waste paper basket.  Clive was unaccustomed to being treated with such casual disrespect, and it overjoyed him, bringing him at last into the physical fellowship of boyhood that he had so long evaded for his own sake.  
  
“Waou! Hall, that hurts!”  
  
Maurice dropped him at once, solicitous: there was no one in their room to see, so that he did not feel compelled to be callous.  “I’m ever so sorry, Durham - did I hurt you badly?  Here, let me see.”  He seized his friend’s hand, warm between his own, and examined it.  “Here, you’re bleeding, you must have scraped in on the wall.  I’m most fearfully sorry - what a brute I am!”  Full of remorse, he lifted Clive’s hand to his lips and kissed it, out of a half-formed impulse that he did not understand.  
  
Clive grew pale and pulled his hand away.  “Don’t fuss so, Hall.  You needn’t treat me like a little girl.”  Wounded, Maurice withdrew, and a slight confused coolness reigned between them for the next few days.  Friends who had seen Maurice’s previous adorations end in quarrels exchanged knowing glances: it had come to this again.  
  
Yet the ardour that had grown between them, unseen by Maurice and both torment and inspiration to Clive, could not be so easily damped.  It was the end of Michaelmas Half, and their goodbyes were subdued.  Over Christmas Maurice spent a great deal of time thinking of his friend, and speaking of him to his mother and sisters quite as if the two of them had not almost quarrelled.  A few days before Christmas there arrived for him a parcel in brown paper, with a short note in Clive’s familiar writing:  
  
 _Hall, old chap,_  
 _I’m sorry I was such a prig at the end of term.  I’ve had a lot on my mind.  I’d be fearfully grateful if you’d give this book a read - the Greek is rather dense, but it might explain things a bit.  We could discuss it next term if you decide you want to._  
 _Your friend,_  
 _C. Durham_  
  
Maurice looked at the book in bewilderment.  The neat _Συμπόσιον_ on the cover gave little away; he understood the word, of course, but not what it might mean to his friend.  His own Greek being fairly execrable, he put it aside for the moment, and wrote his friend a long and cheerful letter about the vac, apologising for his own lack of a Christmas gift and saying at the end that he missed him powerfully and looked forward to seeing him again.  
  
By the beginning of Lent Half he had not made much progress in the book, and said so apologetically to a strangely pale and tense Clive when he enquired.  It seemed to neither relieve nor disappoint his friend, who only offered him to lend him his own Greek grammar - “Only don’t let the beaks see it, Hall,” he added diffidently; “I don’t think they’d quite like it.”  
  
Boy that he still was, this hint of something scandalous encouraged Maurice, and he put forth more effort.  At the same time, he and Clive seemed to have grown closer, to have become more intimate by their parting.  Their affection was more demonstrative, and they walked arm in arm or arm around shoulder now.  When they sat it was nearly always in the same position - Maurice in a chair, and Clive at his feet, leaning against him.  In the world of their school this attracted no notice.  Maurice would stroke Clive’s hair.  
  
Slowly the Symposium unravelled before Maurice’s eyes and made his heart beat fast.  The closest he had come to this before were the sordid jokes about the Eton tart, and once a reference in a written commentary to _the unspeakable vice of the Greeks_.  He had never put the two together, but now something in him stirred, woke, reached upwards to the light.  Here was Durham, head resting against Maurice’s knee as he read; here were the ancient words; here the subtle movement in his own heart, the hidden voice that cried out: come!  There was a thing that had always been in him, in his passions for other boys - he remembered George the garden boy - it was something that he had not known could be mentioned, and in reading it set down plain upon a page a breath of liberty touched him.  
  
A mind like Maurice’s is not given to sudden revelation.  The new knowledge he had been granted worked in him slowly, not a rending of the veil but a slow unfurling.  
  
Did his friend, then, feel this thing too?  He had written him that letter.  The conviction grew in Maurice’s mind: surely his friend must love him.  Surely he must love his friend.  The fact: he loved men and always had loved them. He longed to embrace them and mingle his being with theirs; beyond that, he loved Clive Durham.  
  
But how to broach the subject?  The possibility of mistake loomed large in Maurice’s thoughts, overshadowed the bright joy of love discovered.  Durham would mock him - strike him - turn pale and withdraw as he had done before, but with cringing horror.  Again and again he played scenes out in his fancy.   _You disgust me_ , Durham’s voice said, and _go to hell_ ; but it rang false.  A kinder, dispassionate sympathy, as for a sick man - these morbid thoughts - you have misunderstood.  He cringed at the thought, and became a coward.  
  
He finished the _Symposium_ , set it on his shelf.  When they were together, the air seemed to thrum; whenever he put his hand in Clive’s hair, his heart cramped, made his fingers tremble.  Sometimes he thought that Clive trembled too, sometimes that he drew away.  It was maddening - impossible.  More than once he went to raise the subject, more than once he failed.  
  
Long Leave came: ten days apart!  They wrote to one another, long impassioned letters.  Maurice never let them out of his pocket, changing them from coat to coat and even pinning them in his pyjamas when he went to bed.  He would wake up and touch them and, watching the reflections from the street lamp, remember how he used to feel afraid as a little boy.  Now the only fear in him was loss of the beloved.  
  
February; Long Leave was over.  Maurice could bear it no longer.  They sat in their room, Maurice in his chair and Clive at his feet.  Maurice stretched out a hand and felt the head nestle against it.  He forgot what he was going to say.  The sounds and scents whispered, “You are we, we are youth.”  Very gently he stroked the hair and ran his fingers down into it as if to caress the brain.  
  
“I say, Durham, have you been alright?”  
  
“Have you?”  
  
“No.”  
  
“You wrote you were.”  
  
“I wasn’t.”  
  
A strange long silence between them, taut as a rope.  Maurice’s fingers stroked tenderly from temple to throat.  It was too much, and sighs broke from him. They rattled in his throat, turning to groans. His head fell back, and he forgot the pressure of Clive on his knee, forgot that Clive was watching his turbid agony. He stared at the ceiling with wrinkled mouth and eyes, understanding nothing except that man has been created to feel pain and loneliness without help from heaven.  
  
Now Clive stretched up to him, stroked his hair. They clasped one another. They were lying breast against breast soon, head was on shoulder, but just as their cheeks met someone called "Hall" from the corridor, and he answered: he always had answered when people called. Both started violently, and Clive sprang to the mantelpiece where he leant his head on his arm. Absurd people came thundering into the room, arguing over some bet; Maurice was drawn into conversation, yet he saw his friend withdraw and felt quite sick for the moment just lost to them.  
  
He could bear it no longer: he must to the breach, and take the risk.  If love must make men dare to die for their beloved, as he had learned from Plato’s Socrates, then he must dare at least to make himself known to his.  
  
That night: “You know I read the _Symposium_ that you gave me.”  Clive allowed that he did.  “Then you understand - without me saying more -”  Yet Clive did not, or did not dare to, and Maurice must press on in a whisper: “I love you.”  
  
He had feared that Clive would spring away - he did not; dared to imagine that they might embrace, yet this did not come.  Clive’s eyes had gone intensely blue, his face quite palely grave.  “But - are you sure?”  
  
“I tell you, I do - I must say it - in your very own way - I have always been like the Greeks and did not know it.”  
  
Clive’s face suffused with blood, a startling sight to Maurice.  “Maurice - ”  It was the first time he had called him so.  Warmth was upon him.  “Maurice, Maurice - Oh _Maurice_ …”  
  
“I know.”  
  
“Maurice, I love you.”  
  
“I you.”  
  
They kissed, scarcely wishing it, then drew apart, each to his own bed: more was unbearable.  Both were trembling; each listened to his beloved’s breath, deepening into sleep.  The spring sky was dark beyond the windowpane, scattered with pale stars.

 

  
  
Beyond that they did not speak of it.  They went on together in a perfect haze of happiness, each acting as he had before but filled with a deep and secret delight.  Love was too new for speech, too trembling; in its reality too overwhelming; in its implications, too frightening to both.  An early heatwave, reducing them to disobedient shirtsleeves and burned noses; an exeat weekend apart, almost too much to bear.  
  
On the night of their return Maurice slipped into Clive’s bed.  “Are you awake?”    
  
They embraced, relieved, and Clive said, “I am.  Though I tell you, I should have gone through all life only half-awake if you'd had the decency to leave me alone. Awake intellectually, yes, and emotionally in a way; but here--" He pressed his fingers to his heart; and both smiled. "Perhaps we woke up one another. I like to think that anyway.”  
  
"When did you first care about me?"  
  
"Don't ask me," said Clive.  
  
"Oh, be a bit serious—well—what was it in me you first cared about?"  
  
"Like really to know?" asked Clive, who had been that day in the mood Maurice adored—half mischievous, half passionate; a mood of supreme affection.  
  
"Yes."  
  
"Well, it was your beauty."  
  
"My what?"  
  
"Beauty."  
  
Maurice blushed, which annoyed him; for all his passion, he fancied himself too much a man for that.  "Clive, you're a silly little fool, and since you've brought it up I think you're beautiful, the only beautiful person I've ever seen. I love your voice and everything to do with you, down to your clothes or the room you are sitting in. I adore you."  
  
Clive went crimson. "Sit up straight and let's change the subject," he said, all the folly out of him.  
  
"I didn't mean to annoy you at all—"  
  
"Those things must be said once, or we should never know they were in each other's hearts. I hadn't guessed, not so much at least. You've done all right, Maurice."  He touched his friend’s face.  
  
“I say, will you kiss me?”  
  
Clive shook his head, silent and smiling, so that Maurice did not even feel ashamed.  He accepted it as he accepted all things from Clive: his intellectual rebukes, his tender affection, his unboyish gravity.  Not for the first time, he let the older boy lead.  In him amiability, laziness and a desire to please the beloved came together.  If Clive believed that their love should be thus, then thus would it be.  If he wished their courtship to be slow, then Maurice would accept that without question, no matter how his body itched at night.  
  
Unlike Clive, Maurice found no shame in his desires.  Since they had hitherto always been so formless, springing into focus only through the lens of love, he could not think them foul, or no more so than any boy’s might be.  Yet he was patient with Clive, perhaps having sensed in that moment of his friend’s drawing away some kind of deep fear that must be treated with kindness, not rushed upon as he longed to do.  
  
So through the slow spring days they walked arm in arm, their heads close together.  They shunned other friends, being perfectly caught up in themselves, shared intense thoughts.  No tradition overawed the boys. No convention settled what was poetic, what absurd. They were concerned with a passion that few English minds have admitted, and so created untrammled. Something of exquisite beauty arose in the mind of each at last, something unforgettable and eternal, but built of the humblest scraps of speech and from the simplest emotions.  
  
The vac, when it came, was a torment they had not dreamed of.  Letters would not suffice, and yet they must; being over-parented, they could not pour out their hearts.  Clive’s letters were filled with poetry, Maurice’s with a shy and clumsy longing.   _How I wish I could embrace you, my dearest friend!_  
  
He received in response to this a copy of the _Phaedrus_.  This he read with a better will than the last, though it troubled him obscurely as he neared the end.  This ideal of love without sexual consummation: did Clive truly think this something to be striven for?  For the metaphysics he had no time, being largely uninterested in rhetoric, philosophy, art; he read it only as a lens through which to view his beloved, and what he saw concerned him.  
  
April came; the school opened for the Summer Half; the boys recited _shoures soote_ , and Maurice resolved that he would make a clean breast of things.  It seemed to him the manly thing to do.   _So priketh hem Nature in hir corages_ , and so Maurice was prick’d.  
  
“Hullo, Durham.”  His face, though he did not know it, had gained a bright and very beautiful expression.  “Good to see you again.”  
  
“You too, Hall, old chap.”  They gazed upon each other with infinite pleasure and sympathy; the world was restored to its rightful state, the two halves of their self rejoined.  


 

  
Now that April had come, they were obliged to keep their window open, it being considered healthful by the school.  Though two stories up, they spoke in whispers.  Maurice came across and slid into Clive’s bed, and they embraced.  He stroked Clive’s hair, and Clive’s face rested on his neck.  It felt very hot, and it made him very tender.  
  
After a little blissful time, he put his hand lower.  Clive drew away.  His face in the faint light was not offended or surprised.  “Did you read the _Phaedrus_?” he asked.  It was not a non sequitur at all, and Maurice knew it.  
  
“I did.  Clive - ”  He embraced him again, more firmly now.  
  
“Maurice.”  Clive sat up.  His face was pale and slightly sweaty.  “Surely you must understand - the sole excuse for any relationship between men is that it remain - remain purely platonic.  I love you, yes, but love is a madness, if a divine one - it brings temptation - we must resist that, do you not see -”  He seized his friend’s hands, as if to kiss them, but did not.  “It is in resisting - in _surpassing_ desire, as Plato says, that lover and beloved triumph, exalt one another -“  
  
“Oh, rot!” Maurice retorted.  “Clive, you’re a man, and I’m another.  Bodies, not just brains.  All this Greek theory is all very well, but let’s not talk nonsense now, not between us.  I love you.  I’d share everything I have with you, including my body.  All this old Greek rubbish - won’t you put it aside?”  
  
He reached out for Clive; the other whimpered and drew back.  Dismayed, he dropped his hand.  “Do come off it,” he said, trying to rally, but Clive was in retreat.  
  
He was not a brute, he would not force himself on him.  But he was wounded, too, in his pride and in his love. Did Clive not feel for him as he did for Clive?  Surely he did - his loving touch was every bit as tender, his glance as ardent.  Why had he sent him the Symposium, with its praise of lovers - why had he drawn him into his arms -  Being naive, he did not wholly know the language of sexual frustration, but he knew that he ached for his beloved and had been rebuffed.  A storm of passion grew in him, but he would not resort to angry words.  His pride would not allow it.  
  
He withdrew in turn.  Confused and disappointed, he took refuge in coldness, turning his face to the wall by his own bed.  
  
The next day was a misery.  The harmony between them was broken: Maurice disappointed, Clive betrayed.  Each had had an idea of their love, and of the other, build upon his own ideals; each had seen it shattered.  Older men might have had words for this, but they were boys, and knew only that things were not as they had thought and hoped.  
  
The days strung out.  “Hall and Durham have quarrelled again,” the boys said knowingly; one or two who were more worldly might have tapped their noses.  The house master, that unwitting matchmaker, was disappointed, other teachers somewhat relieved - intensity between the boys was perhaps inevitable but still to be suspected, as a disruptive influence if nothing else.  
  
Maurice was in hell.  He thought perhaps he should apologise, was tempted to do so for the sake of his miserable heart.  Yet what had he to apologise for?  He loved, and loved naturally.  He could not temper that for the sake of dry old books, and would not.  It would be a disservice to himself and his love and his beloved.  He was torn apart, by both separation and the conflict within himself.  
  
Yet if Maurice was in hell, Clive was in its deepest part, for the pain he was undergoing only confirmed his old belief that he was damned.  He had won free of despair by so slim a margin, only Phaedrus holding him above the swamp.  He had restored himself, fallen in love, found his beloved amenable to him, and found that he could indeed resist the darker urgings of his nature, only for this triumph to be dashed.  
  
Clive’s life had been blown to pieces, and he felt no inward strength to rebuild it and clear out evil. To hold himself above the utter abyss he told himself, "Ridiculous boy! I never loved him. I only had an image I made up in my polluted mind, and may God help me to get rid of it."   Yet God had long ago turned his back upon Clive Durham, and did not answer.  As Maurice’s present tormented his waking hours, so his image tormented his sleep.  His dreams were gross, vivid and physically productive; he woke racked in shame, all the worse for knowing that their subject slumbered or did not across the room.  He felt feverish, sick, as he had done since before the start of term.  He had ignored the sensation, buoyed up by their reunion.  Now he could not.  
  
Sleep, then, must cease.  Each night he lay awake, digging his nails into his palms.  His wakefulness must be a secret, kept from the beloved enemy in the nearby bed.  Nails failed; he found a pin, drove it into his own thigh when sleep came too near.  It worked enough.  What little sleep he found was dreamless, exhausted.  From wind-ruddied he became pale once more, heavy-eyed.  (“That boy is sick,” the house master reflected to himself in concern, remembering the reports of neurasthenia.)  His work suffered.  Whenever he was compelled to speak to Maurice, it was an agony that left him trembling.  The summer vac was unthinkably far, and there was no escape.

 

  
  
They were in class, laboriously translating.  “So great was the consternation of the inhabitants of Londinium, when the news came that Jumbonius must leave the shores of England, that not even the judges and senators could refrain from openly expressing their grief.”  “Thank you, Dickerson.  Durham.”  
  
The sun, hot once again, beat down through the window onto the rows of heads.  “Added to these the voices of women and children were heard, exclaiming that now they were being shamefully deprived of their chief pleasure.”  
  
“Speak up, Durham, we can hardly hear you.”  
  
Clive looked up from his book, said, “I’m sorry, sir - I think I’m going to faint,” and fell off his chair.  The class dissolved into uproar - “Fan him, there!” “Open the other window - no, close it -” “I think he’s hit his head.”  
  
“Out of the way, all of you!”  The master’s roar parted the waters.  At his command the Hall boy scooped Durham up quite easily in his strong arms and carried him to the sanitorium, from whose window he had seen the other wheeled in his bath chair, almost a year ago that day.  


  
  
Clive was underwater, somewhere dark and deep.  It was strangely pleasant, being cool and quiet.  The water made his movements slow, turned speech to distant muffled sound.  
  
Sometimes he rose up from the water to a hot bright place where everything hurt.  His head pounded, his eyes felt as though they had been boiled, and his inside was all wrong.  Sometimes he vomited copiously; other times he had to be held upon the night stool by unseen hands.  He wept, humiliated, distantly aware that it was childish but unable to stop.  Then he would sink back down into the underwater place, and silence.  
  
  
“Don’t be ridiculous, Hall.  Durham has to stay in isolation until the doctor says he may leave.  Even his parents haven’t been allowed to see him.”  
  
Maurice swayed a little, buffeted by the news as by a blow.  His rejection - of love on Clive’s terms, and thus of Clive himself - had not only laid the other low, it had made him ill enough for this.  
  
“Sir - oh, sir!”  He sounded like a much younger boy.  “Will he - will he die?”  
  
The house-master, one foot over the threshold of the room, paused.  As has been observed, he was not an unkind man.  He decided that briskness was best: “Die? Don’t be absurd.  Now, you have to see the doctor too, Hall, since you share a room.”  
  
Terror sprang up in the young man’s heart.  Did they _know_?  Could they somehow tell?  But they had done nothing - surely no examination could reveal the truth - only maybe Clive had spoken in delirium -  He trembled, and felt like a coward for it, all the way through the doctor’s examination, and had such a hectic flush that he, too, was shut up in the sanitorium.  Safely quarantined from both Clive and their fellows, he pressed his hot cheek against the smooth coolness of clean linen and, for the first time since they had begun, Maurice wept.  


 

  
Clive was dreaming.  He was no longer under water, but lying beside it, on a riverbank or by some canal or slow-running dyke, which wound its dim brown way under a summer sky.  Everything was lit with that particular golden brightness of a summer’s day, and there were dog-roses and interminable willow trees.  He knew, with a queer wistful intensity, that it was the first pleasant time that he had had in some while, though he could not quite recall why.  
  
Maurice was there, and he knew in the same way that he should have some bad feeling about that, but he didn’t.  He was only happy that they were lying together in the shade of the trees, and after a little while a lark flew up, singing, from the dark fields beyond.  Clive turned to Maurice and kissed him, quite naturally and tenderly, and Maurice put his hand upon Clive as he had once before.  It seemed, again, the most natural thing in the world, and as natural to return the gesture.  “Maurice - Maurice, darling - “  
  
“I’m here. I’m here.”  Fingers touched his face and he awoke.  The lights were out in the sanitorium, only the half-moon beyond the window stirring the dark, but he knew the shape beside his bed at once.  
  
“Maurice - what is - ”  He sat up, thick-headed and confused.  The world span.  
  
Strong hands eased him back.  “Careful, oh, careful!  Darling, darling.”  Cool lips against his cheek.  “You’ve had measels; you’re in the san.  I had to come.”  
  
“Measels?  You shouldn’t…”  Fear sprang up in Clive, though not for himself.  
  
“I’ve had ‘em, though they won’t believe - back at prep school.  They’ve got me in the other room, for observation.  Said if I have it they might have to send the whole house home, at least the sixth form!”  A low chuckle, warm and familiar.  
  
Clive realised he was crying again, hot silent tears.  His eyes still hurt very much, even in the darkness.  “Maurice - Maurice, I’m sorry.  I’ve been such an awful fool.”  
  
A hand, blessedly cool, stroked his hair back with infinite tenderness.  “Shh.  You mustn’t wear yourself out.  I just had to see you, I’ve been so scared.  I’m sorry too.”  
  
Clive put his hand out and found his friend’s in the dark, squeezed weakly.  After a moment: “Sorry - can’t stay awake - so very tired.”    
  
“Sleep, then; I’ll watch you. You’re safe now.”  And all through the warm night Maurice held his hand, watching his friend’s sleeping chest rise and fall: white-sheeted, frail, and so very dear.  


  
  
The school discouraged dishonesty.  Forced into it by society, Maurice decided to embrace it: not in his soul, for that had come into true harmony, but in his acts.  If society forced him outside its laws, why, then, he would relish in spurning their petty restrictions like the old outlaws of Merry England.    
  
He played at sickness, lassitude, warmed his hands and neck with hot water.  The doctor hemmed and shook his head, seeing no overt signs of the disease yet still concerned enough to keep him isolated.  With Clive recovering they were allowed to see one another, though, “You mustn’t tire each other out, boys.”  The white and antiseptic San became their greenwood; they sat in long soft conversation, holding each other’s hands, or when under Matron’s eye played obedient games of Old Maid, back of one’s hand brushing the other’s forearm when they moved, bringing up the fine hairs in a secret prickle of delight.  
  
But the nights, oh, the nights were theirs!  Matron would look in on them at midnight, and then not ‘til six.  As soon as the sound of her shoes faded in the corridor, and the distant doorway shut, one would slip from his bed and come to the other, feet bare on tiled floor.    
  
Now their embraces were not chaste but heated, their kisses no longer brief and sentimental.  Clive had been brushed by the wing of death, and in its passing a new angel of life had come hurrying to his soul.  You are young, it cried to him, and beautiful, and you may make your own freedom!  No longer must you punish yourself with abstinence; seize hold of your love in the vigour of this your spring, and know beauty that you have not dreamed of!  Their Greece now was not that of dusty pages and cracked marbles but the burning summer isles of ancient days, their own Arcadia, lusty as any Pan.  
  
“Listen, listen,” said Maurice, drawing his friend against his side.  “This is the part I thought of, here: ‘ _...as our own tyrants found out, for Aristogeiton’s love and Harmodius’ constancy in the union of their love undid their tyrannies.  And therefore, in places where it is the custom to hold the loves of youths in disfavour and to forbid their gratification, it is because the governors of those lands are corrupt with the lust for their own power and because the people are lazy; the defect is in those who make the rule_.’”    
  
His translation was clumsy, yet his spirit sweetly earnest, saying to his friend’s: do you not see? The defect is not in you, it never was, and you need not rein yourself in in so cruel a way.  Your own gods are with you, and your beloved Plato - and I, your own dear Maurice, who adores you.  
  
Once Clive would have countered with words and thoughts; now he only smiled, and took the beloved hand in his own and kissed it.  “You are wiser than me, Maurice,” and so Maurice was, in the instinctive wisdom of the young animal, the spring grass, and the sun.  Uncountered by Clive’s finer sensibilities, he might have become crude, as Clive without him had become ascetic; together they blossomed like the spring.  
  
“Put the book down, Maurice,” Maurice feigned shock, “oh, stop clowning - come here - let me -”  Hands, mouths offered bliss, bodies received; the moon outside the window, looking in, might have blushed.  They grappled, thigh to thigh and breast to breast; strained, gasped, convulsed fiercely; came to rest.  
  
“I hadn’t known,” Clive said, low against Maurice’s ear, “that it could be like this, dearest.  It never gave me any - satisfaction, on my own.”  His cheek was as hot as it had been in his fever.  “It only ever revolted me. I thought it would be like that with someone else, but this is…heavenly.”  
  
“It didn’t revolt me,” Maurice said frankly, “but it didn’t do much for me, either, I must say.  A cold shower always did as well for me.  But this makes me - Clive, it makes me understood everything you had me read, you know.  The first lot, I mean, the _Symposium_.  All that stuff about _desire and pursuit of the whole_ , and - and the _communion_ ,” was it wrong to use that word, for what they did? He supposed he didn’t much care, now, “of lovers making them the friend of the divine, and immortal… I thought it was fearful rot at first,” he confessed, worried that he’d offend, but Clive only laughed and drew him gently under him again.  
  
Early summer, and they were released from the sanitorium.  “They can’t send me home to Penge, Mater’s in Italy until the end of May!  This is much jollier - and besides,” more shyly, “now we shan’t be parted.”  A slow recovery for Clive, many classes missed, exhausting private work in their study-bedroom; a fast one for Maurice, who had never been sick.  
  
The privacy of their room was a haven.  If bedsprings squeaked, that was hardly unheard of in a boarding house full of boys, and no suspicion attached to it.  Helping Clive with missed lessons, Maurice’s own mind improved immeasurably.  He would never be cerebral, but his intellectual laziness began to evaporate at last; in his turn, Clive embraced the sensual, entering into his own body in a way that he had never done.  If he could not trust his flesh - so what?  Mistrusting it had not spared him sickness, and had nearly cost him love.  To die without ever having known this: it had become unthinkable, appalling.    
  
They met and matched each other, each driving the other to improve himself, supporting where he was weak, encouraging where fearful.  The twin horses of their souls pulled together in the trace.  Their school-masters, formerly wary, became approving: it was plain to scandal would attach to the school, as hitherto to narrowly-escaped Sunnington, as if anything in _that line_ was occuring neither seemed inclined to involve the masters or to be anything but discreet, and instead some academic glory might ensue from Durham.  The house-master congratulated himself, perhaps a little wistfully, in his own empty room.  
  
May came, and June, and with it tennis, cricket, track and field.  Clive, relieved to be barred from the field, watched; Maurice strove to impress, much as any Greek youth, and driven to greater effort brought the school victory at discus and javelin.  “So Classical!” Clive crowed, and kissed him secretly.  They spent the Long Leave at school together, walking quietly in the grounds.  One afternoon they lay by the river, shielded by kindly willows, and when they kissed Clive remembered the dream that brought him out of fever and into his friend’s arms.  
  
The end of June.  Surely never had any schoolboys so hated the coming of the long vac as these!  “Write me.” “Every day. You’ll come to Penge?” “As soon as my mother’ll let me.”  Hands were clasped, hot cheeks pressed secretly together.  Explicit promises were whispered into gently blushing ears.  “Only one more year - then Cambridge!  No one will part us then, not ever again.”  “Oh, I love you - I _love_ you.  Don’t forget me -” “I never could - Oh, your train is here!  How I hate it!”  “Soon - soon - So long, Clive!  I’ll miss you so!”    
  
So long - so long!  The train steaming slow and inexorable along the platform, a slight boy running alongside, cap discarded, the sun in his fair hair.  “Two weeks, Hall!  Two weeks, and I’ll see you at Penge!”  The carriage draws away, another boy leans out of the window, brandishes a battered copy of the _Symposium_ against the summer sun.  All promise, all ripeness, all joy, and they are only just beginning that great unfurling of two souls together.    
  
The train leaves the platform, dwindles slowly; the fair boy stops running, leans panting against the rail.  His heart is pounding with love and pain, but it is the delightful anguished pain of separation soon to end.  “Maurice!” he says, breathless, name a sweet burst against his tongue.  He has only just begun to sample bliss, but it has saved him, and shall save him all his days.  His ancient house may crumble, his old name end in him; he may go to war, but though he comes home scarred it will be to dear familiar arms, and he will live long enough to see a day of justice: when from the bench the man he was spared being may no longer condemn their love.  


**Author's Note:**

> Most quotes are attributed within the text; several passages are drawn directly or amended from Forster. The childhood book Maurice re-reads is Tom Brown's Schooldays.


End file.
